The police are now asking for the public’s help in locating two paintings stolen from the Nicholas Roerich Museum on two dates in late June, according to the New York Times. The museum seems perhaps an unlikely location for art crime and intrigue. Housed in a brownstone on a quiet block of the Upper West Side of New York and dedicated solely to the work of an obscure Russian artist, it is open only three hours a day and is rarely mentioned in guidebooks.

The paintings, worth a total of about thirty thousand dollars, are both small: One is ten inches by fourteen inches, and the other is twelve inches by sixteen inches. Daniel Entin, the museum’s director, speculated that their size facilitated the crime.

The paintings were stolen during visiting hours on June 24 and June 28, the police said. “A lot of people come here, and during the open hours, somebody stole one painting,” Entin said. “And then, maybe a day, later stole another.”

He said he believed that the same person, a woman, was responsible for both thefts. The museum displays about 150 works by Roerich, a prolific Russian-born artist who produced about 7,000 paintings in the early twentieth century. A trained ethnographer, Roerich was best known as a costume and set designer, working with the composer Igor Stravinksy on the ballet The Rite of Spring, a work that famously caused a riot when it premiered in Paris in 1913.

In other news, the Acropolis Museum in Greece has reversed a decision to cut part of a short film by the director Costa-Gavras after protests and the threat of a lawsuit, according to the New York Times. His animated short, shown as part of a longer film about the history of the Parthenon, included a scene in which cartoon characters wearing dark cloaks climb ladders and destroy part of the Parthenon’s frieze, a well-documented occurrence during the early Byzantine period when Christians often dismantled pagan landmarks.

Officials from the Greek Orthodox Church contended that the scene misrepresented their attitude toward ancient history. After the scene was cut, Costa-Gavras, who has won two Oscars (for Z and Missing), asked that his name be removed from the film and complained to Greek media that he was being subjected to Soviet-style censorship. But when he explained that the cloaked figures were not priests but merely early Christians, the museum decided to reinstate the scene.